Traditionally, video monitoring (or surveillance) systems have been deployed in a localized manner in which the analysis of events is isolated to a facility, geographic location, or a particular organization. That is, little or no sharing of video information across organizations is performed. From a security standpoint, this lack of coordination can introduce security risks and undermine prevention schemes. The isolation of monitoring systems stems, in part, from the high cost of sharing high fidelity video over a bandwidth constrained telecommunications infrastructure. That is, the technologies involved with video transmission and processing are expensive and inflexible. Notably, delivery of interactive media (which describe real events in the real world in real-time) in general requires the capability to quickly acquire, store, edit, and composite live and other descriptive media by numerous users. Such engineering hurdle has hindered the advancement of high resolution video surveillance.
Based on the foregoing, there is a clear need for approaches that exploit video and communication technologies to more efficiently and cost-effectively support video surveillance applications.